Keith Jarrett/Deena Metzger
Death Black As A Crow
Chant of the Soil
You,
You could not bring me to believe in death.
Feathers so radiant with light
could only be the night sky,
could only be eternity.
A stream of blood from your yellow beak
drying on the pavement.
The roots of the tree
were not the right burial ground.
A neighbor’s cat was wandering
up and down the entrance
to the shul among the olive trees,
and though ravens had fed Elijah,
Halleluiah
Still, I could not bring you,
who had received
the gift of dark from Apollo,
to Kol Neidre,
the Hebrew prayer for the dead.
We spoke, you, Crow, and I,
as I drove us home,
We spoke
of what concerns all sentient beings,
of all the killing we do.
This morning, I laid you on the hill
at the feet of Avalokitesvara,
Infinite Compassion.
gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā,
I stroked your feathers.
I wanted
Your dark light on my hands.
I did not take your wing
I did not take a single feather
I know the animals
will dismember you,
despite your shroud
of pine needles
and tobacco.
Mitkaye Oyasin
Here is my prayer:
Do not forgive us
our transgressions.
Let the black light
that surrounds you
meet the ancient fire
in the core of the earth,
for the wedding
of prophecy and possibility.
Sunlight
inherent in your beak
speak to us.
Do not
Do not
Do not forgive us
our transgressions.
Sunlight
Inherent in your beak
Speak to us.
Speak to us.
Ashe
Blessed be!
Ashe
Blessed be!
How Do The Dead Vanish?
Silence (with Charlie Haden)
How do the dead vanish entirely?
How does the hand,
that gripped the cup, disappear,
while the cup remains,
disconnected from the source?
My father left nothing,
but two watches,
one, for each grandchild.
My mother gave his lost son
a wrinkled handkerchief
.
I gave my brother,
an old tallit
without knowing
to whom it had belonged.
It was his legacy,
father to son,
with love and mourning
I am left with a paperweight,
and the small desk
where he wrote stories.
With one breath,
the intensity of my life
will dissolve.
Nothing will prevent this.
Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Bagdad, Palmyra,[1]
disappeared.
The quick and the slow
shattered the eternity of beauty,
without mercy.
We reconstruct the past
From the DNA
of a point of memory.
It comes to life,
lives now,
as we remember it,
in our longing and our fear.
What was real was the cup.
The hand is no more,
soon the clay will follow.
And what if the dying
take a piece of the living
to sustain them?
Matter, transforms into energy,
travels the universe
for billions of years,
seeking its history of form.
[1] Dresden comes in at 1:30 minutes of the piece.
Truth Telling
Spiral Dance
Anything,
anything,
can be destroyed
by the human hand.
Sometimes
even a garden
is an act against nature.
I bought an orchard
and let it go feral,
but the wolf
is on a leash.
You will shoot her in the street
And sell her pelt
to some one like me.
There was a poem about not telling the truth,
This is a poem about not telling the truth
The truth I refuse is that I will die
sooner than expected
and I will not be ready.
I will not have done
What must be done.
You will die
Sooner than you expect
without having done
what must be done.
When we look out at the mountains,
we think we are immortal,
then we shear their peaks
cut down their life line.
I will not
You will not
We will not
do
What must be done.
What must be done
What if in this
life, I could save one creature
and its life force would multiply?
What if every bullet bounded back to its source?
Sometimes, I believe
if we find the right prayer,
the river of blood will clear.
How many land mines and drones
must we destroy
to walk
on the land again?
We tried to save one Bull elephant
who was seeding generations,
so the hunter shot the Matriarch.
Why does killing pleasure you so?
Remember when invaders
came down from the North
with their weapons and horses?
Now, we are rounding up the horses.
You would like another ending to this poem,
I would like it if the world wasn’t ending.
What else is there to say?
We are either killing the horses
and not eating them,
or we are eating the horses.
We are definitely killing each other.
Speak to me of your appetite.
You would like another ending to this poem,
I would like it if the world wasn’t ending.